The most creative person in music business on what to expect in 2024

Nathan Hubbard has always been on the leading edge of figuring out how to leverage new technologies and music industry ecosystem shifts to turbocharge artists’ careers. After a stint as a musician, he switched gears in the early 2000s and joined the startup Musictoday, which was figuring out how to use the emerging internet to get music and sports merch to fans.

When Hubbard was tapped to run Ticketmaster in the mid-2000s, he did so with the goal of determining how to use the behemoth to bring fans and musicians together. In the mid-2010s, he jumped to Twitter, where he spearheaded its global media and e-commerce efforts. Three years later, he founded the Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup Rival to reimagine digital ticketing.

And last year, he launched Firebird, a new kind of agency for musicians that is mixing data science, access to capital, and traditional artist management to help musicians build their brands and maximize their revenues in this new multi-hyphenate creator-performer world.

More than ever, Hubbard says, musicians need to be entrepreneurially minded and think of themselves as brands that should be leveraging all the tools and strategies that consumer product companies use to build their audiences. We turned to Hubbard for a read on the latest hot topics in the music industry, and to give us a glimpse of what lies ahead.

Throughout your career, you’ve thought about how to manage artists, finding new ways to help them grow their brands—and their businesses—in light of the continual changes in the music ecosystem. What are you doing today at Firebird that couldn’t have been done 20 years ago?

It’s not so much artist management as it is helping artists build direct relationships with their fans and achieving what Elvis and Colonel [Tom] Parker were thinking about back in the day, which was, How do I take what are some of the biggest and most beloved direct-to-consumer brands on the planet [i.e., musicians], and help them function in that way? That’s work that I did as an artist myself coming out of college, it’s what I did at Ticketmaster, it’s what we built at Twitter, it’s what I did at Rival, and it is absolutely what we are doing at Firebird.

The difference from the time that I started as an artist to today is there’s been such an evolution of technology—coupled with structural changes in the industry that came out of COVID—such that all of the tools and technology are now in place to help artists build that coveted direct and owned relationship with the fans.

Firebird, at the core, is a platform to help artists build longer-lasting, more impactful, and ultimately more profitable careers. In terms of artist management, it used to be a guy with a cellphone. In this new landscape, the artist manager is now really the central point for building and activating an artist’s brand and for identifying and growing an artist’s audience. That’s a function that historically had been managed by record labels. Back then, recorded music was at least 90% of an artist’s income stream. Today, 80% of an artist’s income stream comes from the road. So that’s a very different set of partners.

Since 2000, really since Napster, artists’ representatives have become fragmented. There hasn’t been a centralized place thinking about an artist’s brand. Some of these artists’ brands are as big as Nike, as prominent and powerful as Apple. So we’re trying to build a company that has the resources and tools and capital to help support an artist in that way.

So if I’m a 25-year-old singer-songwriter today, and I’m thinking about building my career, how do I need to think about it differently than if I were doing this in the year 2000?

In the year 2000, you were touring to support an album. And today, you’re making music to support all of the other income streams that exist, principally touring. But over the course of the next few years, in a highly accelerated way, your presence in the digital space—your presence as a physical, consumer product brand and the name and likeness that you possess—that is followed by an audience, you’re going to be able to bring to new platforms as they emerge. That’s the fundamental core shift.

Also, in 2000 you had no way to communicate directly with your audience. Today, there’s no excuse for not owning the direct customer relationship. What’s unique about the music business is, because of the explosion of live events, you as an artist now have the ability to have all of your most passionate customers standing in front of you. You literally get to meet them in the flesh. There’s almost no other business in the world where you get to do that.

That puts the responsibility on the artists to do the work to build and manage those relationships, in the same way that every other business brand does, i.e., Let me make sure I understand who these people are. Let me understand what they like. Let me understand their characteristics, so that I can service them and deliver an amazing experience across the spectrum of age and income and geolocation. Then let me use the tools that are available to advertisers and brands to go find the audiences that look like the ones I know today to grow my presence. That’s the sort of science of digital audience growth that the business world has capitalized on over the last two decades that we are now helping artists capitalize on.

So it sounds like musicians who might mostly just want to make and perform music have to think deeply along these business lines in ways that they didn’t before.

Some of the most successful musicians are also great entrepreneurs and incredible brand managers. Jay-Z. Madonna. Bono of U2. Certainly today Taylor Swift is chief among them. But it is incumbent upon all artists to also be entrepreneurs on a go-forward basis. We’re in this age post-COVID where everybody has a side hustle. Where everyone is a multi-hyphenate creator. It’s impossible to think about artists in the future not also being short-form video creators, right? If you’re going to reach your audience, putting out songs and not having a video presence where you’re connecting with your fans is almost unthinkable. The medium through which fans connect with the individual behind the music—the soundtrack of their lives—those things have expanded, and artists will have to evolve as creators to meet those needs.

They also need to evolve as entrepreneurs and businesspeople, because they have the responsibility to manage that brand—in part because of the way that the industry has evolved. The change in the economic structure at record labels means nobody else is picking up that ball. Now there are plenty of artists who have an entrepreneurial bent, but they don’t want to wake up every day and go sit in an office chair and spend a huge portion of their time on this. So that’s why the function of artist management is becoming more important than ever and expanding in terms of the requirements for what it takes to help service an artist.

How is AI going to impact the music business? Will it help? Hurt? Neither?

I think a session mandolin player in Nashville probably has some things to worry about. On the whole, though, AI music can be a wonderful accelerant for artists, helping to turn kernels of ideas into full-fledged music. I don’t think there’s any debate that AI is going to have a massive period of dislocation and fundamental societal, systemic change over the course of the next five years. It may be on the same scale as World War II, the internet, and mobile access to the internet in terms of how it changes our daily lives.

We feel very sure that what does not change is human beings’ desire for a soundtrack to their lives, and for the role that music plays in their lives. And, importantly, the connection to the artist who is behind that. There’s a reason the Bored Ape Yacht Club band has not taken off yet. Maybe it will. But the reason Taylor Swift is the biggest artist in the world, the reason people are filling up stadiums for Beyoncé, is that at a time of so much division and confusion, we love these monocultural moments to come together with other people who are different than us and celebrate the same thing. So we believe that while AI is going to be an accelerant for the creation of music, it will not replace the fundamental human infatuation and passion with human artists and creators.

How about the concert boom: Do you think it will last?

I do. In this age when we are so tightly tethered to screens and to digital communication, and to nonhuman interaction, we’re still chemically wired to be together. Concerts—just as with live sporting events—allow us to come together in a single moment and celebrate that with other people. There’s a through line between the increased digitization of our human communication, and the energy, enthusiasm, and demand for live events because it’s something that keeps us human.

Plus, social media creates these FOMO moments—like the “secret song”—that make people want to be there. But I don’t think it’s just about that. We need to get out of the house and go be among other people. And it’s an experience now with the evolution of technology that makes a live event better. If you saw the Eras tour, that thing is a visual marvel.

Speaking of technology, I don’t imagine other cities are going to build their own Spheres, but is there anything they should consider implementing, given the success in Las Vegas?

Yeah, 100%. I’ve been in the Sphere. It was a magical experience. The interesting takeaway is this idea that the live-event experience is going to continue to evolve. Part of that is going to be the venue itself. The venue as a canvas for the art is a fascinating idea, such that the canvas of the physical space is a part of the show.

There’s always going to be a place for a stadium show. But you’re increasingly seeing artists playing smaller, different kinds of venues either to super-serve a certain segment of fan, or because it is that venue itself that helps to create the experience. So the Sphere for me is the tip of the spear of the next evolution of the live experience, where fans are going to demand something more evolved than standing in a field. If I’m every other venue in the world, I’m a little anxious. Now I’ve got to figure out how to keep up.

As you know, music-discovery darling Bandcamp was recently sold to Songtradr, and half of its staff was laid off. What does that mean for the future of indie music?

I worry about that a little bit, but there are so many platforms today that bring audience to artists that I’m incredibly optimistic about opportunities for independent artists to manage their own careers.

All of that said, there is a lot of noise out there right now. It’s great that everybody can pick up an instrument and start creating, and that some of those people turn into Justin Bieber. It is also true that some of those people are not great artists. Increasingly, with a glut of supply, what’s going to be really interesting are the platforms that help filter out the stuff that’s good. It gives us opportunities to decide democratically what we’re all going to ultimately come around.

So I don’t think Bandcamp has a monopoly on the surfacing of great talent and great artists, and I certainly don’t think they have a monopoly on freeing independent artists from the capital constraints of the music industry. There’s always going to be a trade-off in terms of how much of each dollar an artist makes, and the audience that comes with it. There will be other platforms that step up.

Okay, last question. TikTok: Good for the music industry? Bad? Other?

So forget the impact on the minds of children—and on the minds of adults who act like children—because of the information they process on the platform. TikTok is unequivocally the most important platform in the music business. It is a platform that has worked to reintroduce old music to new consumers but also to break [new] artists.

On a go-forward basis, I have three concerns. One is algorithmically, is it, in fact, surfacing the best stuff? Two, is it paying artists fairly? And three, is the industry over-reliant on a platform that is relatively unhealthy for most of the free world? If that’s the case, how do we begin to not become overly reliant, as an artist community, on a platform that’s going to go away, either through government regulatory imposition or otherwise?

For example, a lot of Web3 was complete BS. But one of the enduring principles of Web3 is that creators and artists should own equity in the platforms that they help create. And so TikTok probably will be the last platform that artists don’t have some ownership in. Whatever is next is more interesting than TikTok, even as important as TikTok is today. Whatever is next is more interesting because for the same reason that Taylor Swift does not appear to be on Threads, she will bring an enormous audience to whatever platform is going to be next. She deserves to be paid and compensated, not just in dollars, but also in equity ownership, for that audience. And every artist underneath Taylor does too.